Funding alert: AI startup Sorcero raised a (mid-pandemic) $3.5M bridge round

Adams Morgan-based Sorcero has closed a $3.5 million bridge to a Series A led by Leawood Venture Capital and WorldQuant Ventures.

Founded in 2018 by Dipanwita Das, Richard Graves and Walter Bender, Sorcero provides tools to make it easier for a company’s team members to find answers to questions via its AI-powered KnowledgeBot. The startup’s natural language processing (NLP) platform is supposed to help with decision-making for enterprises working in the life sciences and insurance sectors.

“Our mission is to enable others, and that’s how we think of everything we build and design,” Das, the company’s CEO, told Technical.ly. “The way we’re solving that is that, Sorcero is building a language intelligence platform to help enterprises leverage all of their technical expertise.”

The fresh funding will be used to further develop Sorcero’s tech platform. With this bridge round, Karl Gemperli from Leawood Venture Capital joins the startup’s board of directors, along with Claiborne Deming, Sr.

“This investment will enable us to move closer to our goal of transforming how technical experts work,” Das said in a statement. “We have already seen remarkable traction in life sciences and insurance and are excited about expanding our impact. We cannot be more grateful to have secured resources to make that happen in the midst of such tragic instability.”

Sorcero first got started in April 2018 with a $100,000 investment from Das herself, another $100,000 from Graves and other financial support from family and friends. Das said the company initially set out to raise $250,000 after its launch, but Sorcero ended up raising a $1.7 million pre-seed convertible note. This pre-seed round included an investment from West Coast-based Plug and Play Ventures as part of an accelerator program Sorcero participated in this past fall.

These investments plus the company’s bridge round brings Sorcero’s total venture capital raise to $5.4 million to date. Das said the company hadn’t explicitly been looking to raise the new $3.5 million, but investor interest climbed.

“We’re raising money in the place of a pandemic and if people want to give us money, I’m not going to say no,” she said. “It brings security to my team and my customers.”

Dipanwita Das pitches Sorcero on June 2018 at a Vinetta Project event. (Photo by Christopher Wink)

Sorcero has about 10 customers across North America and Europe already using its platform. The startup has a team of 22 employees, 70% of which hold roles in product and engineering, with plans to expand by 10 to 12 employees by year-end — a jump from when Das pitched at the Vinetta Project in summer 2018, when she said her team was only comprised of about five employees. With this funding round, Sorcero also welcomed four new team members: Benjamin Kubic joins as VP of finance and operations, Seetal Patel as director of product management, Nnaemeka Osakwe as director of customer success, and Jonathan Dodge as lead product designer.

“When I pitched at Vinetta, what I pitched was bridging the gap between learning and work, and that is what we are doing,” Das said. “We are making sure that people are able to do their work better but they are also learning as they do it. But how they do it is where everything changes and that’s where the real meat of everything is.”

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sorcero was already working remotely with some employees residing outside of the U.S. Das said the company has been especially looking to add team members who were laid off from other companies due to the pandemic.